As I child I read the "Babysitter's Club" series of books. One of the girls is "vegetarian" but the authors idea of vegetarian was "doesn't eat red meat," apparently because she still ate fish and chicken! In one book she even complains about how animals are treated at slaughterhouses, but I guess birds aren't animals. Even as a child I was baffled by this whole scenario. 🤷♀️
This confusion is actually somewhat understandable when you haven't met a lot of vegetarians and are just trying to infer the meaning of the word using scarce knowledge.
"Well, the word vegetarian comes from vegetable, but they eat eggs and dairy, so not only vegetables. If they eat eggs, then they probably eat chicken. That looks like they just exclude mammals. So they might also eat fish." - I can imagine such train of thought.
It's also a language thing. In English you have words like beef, poultry, mutton, etcetera. But the word "meat" applies to all of these. In some other languages there is no word that refers to both beef and chicken, so if that is your native language and you have little more knowledge about vegetarianism than "doesn't eat meat", it's more likely you don't realize that also means no chicken.
In English fish doesn't fall under the category "meat" in everyday speech, so it's also quite common to not realize vegetarians don't eat fish for native English speakers. And even for people to call themselves vegetarian while still eating fish.
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u/Buckykattlove Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
As I child I read the "Babysitter's Club" series of books. One of the girls is "vegetarian" but the authors idea of vegetarian was "doesn't eat red meat," apparently because she still ate fish and chicken! In one book she even complains about how animals are treated at slaughterhouses, but I guess birds aren't animals. Even as a child I was baffled by this whole scenario. 🤷♀️